Apologies if this has been discussed before, but I am thinking about how well games like Civilization or better Colonization would work in a Real-time environment. Most RTS games are [un-originally] based on a small environment and you usually only get 1 base to build. What if you had to colonize an entire continent and fight off other would-be colonizers and the game was based on groups of troops with AI commanders, rather than the individuals, micro-managed, style currently used. Also based more on towns rather than individual buildings. I think ''Kohan'' tried something like this, but not sure if any other games have tried taking RTS up in scale. A

Verant''s Sovereign ?

I'm sure it could be managed TECHNOLOGICALLY easily, but there are practical problems. For example, its hard to create a visual of 50 troops marching across a territory about 50 miles wide. That's the main problem of games like Civ/Colonization -- their scale is sometimes quite incongruous. Unless you have really fast units on hoverbikes or something, it should realistically take something like 30 hours for a group of footsoldiers to walk across one 50 mile square of land. No game player is going to settle for that.


The alternative is to base the game on a huge environment, and focus on small sections at once -- sort of like a zoom system. There are two problems here. The main problem is practicality -- storing the memory and graphics for an entire continent is a tall order, you're looking at something like 2 GB if you use an isometric/tilebased engine (very rough estimate).

The second problem with the zoom approach is player management. Personally, I find it hard to think when I have 3 groups of orcs raiding my camp from different directions. If you try to force a player to deal with events all over the map, they'd never get a break from trying to defend themselves or coordinate assaults on the enemy, and the game would simply be stressful instead of fun.



This brings us back to the idea of using the original Civ-style map. Aside from the obvious problems with scale, you're faced again with the "manage the whole world at once" problem. Epic, continent sized battles work in turn-based environments because the player has time to think about where everything is. Under the pressure of realtime, its a royal pain to have to defend 3 cities at once, on opposite edges of the map.

There's one final hurdle to this as well: time. Just as the scale problem makes it fake for a cavalry to ride across North America in a minute flat, scale also makes time messy. In a continent sized game, you typically draw your forces from the population pool. In a realtime game, this population pool doesn't really have time to grow all that much, making a colony-style approach rather difficult to balance. In a turnbased system, where a turn may represent a month or even 20 years, the population growth, crop harvesting, etc. is a LOT more realistic because it doesn't have to happen realtime.



The main solution to these problems is either to use a really technology-based world where all these issues are handled automatically (which is pointless because then you totally lose your sense of how big the game is because you don't recognize any elements of it) or you can simply have sped-up time. However, the "fastforward" approach is also risky because there will be things like battles or unit manufacturing that cannot happen instantly, but the fastforward environment, in order to be consistent, would have to make them occur instantly.


There very well may be a good answer to all this that nobody's thought of; maybe I'm the only one who hasn't thought of it yet; I don't know. Those are just my thoughts as to why it would be hard to manage.


Apoch
Lead Developer
The Freon Project

[edited by - apoch on April 26, 2002 9:08:49 AM]

[edited by - apoch on April 26, 2002 9:09:27 AM]

As I see it the limit of real time is what a person can realistically do in a few seconds of time.

If you want something truely epic. Say a war across sevral planets that involves hundreds of little skirmishes there are 3 or 4 ways to handle this:

1) The traditional solotion. Make it turn based. In that way the player has an unlimited amount of time to move or place his or her units, issue oders, change economies. etc.
What were looking for is a better way.

2) AI. Basically the computer could handle what we humans could not, it could manage thousands of troops at once. On a small scale this was seen in starcraft. Watch the computer use terran. I think terran would be the best race hands down if it was physically possible to do what the compter does. (have 8 ghost lockdown your feelt while at the same time flanking you wiht goliaths, while expanding while reparing the goliaths with scvs, while across the map he attacking with stimed marines and seige tanks. ACK!).
Reguardless of that the same could be applied in a scale where the compuers ai control of your troops is good. You can realistically issue over arching orders, (this battle should be a skirmish, while this battle is for all the marbles, this town should be expanding while this one is working on research, that sort of thing.)
Then you could set it up so that once the orders are given you could jump into a lower level of control, as in a tradtional rts while the comp handels the day to day.
Two potental flaws with this system.
1) The computer is too good, then you just can issue your orders and go have a sandwitch the computer is playing the game for you. Not fun
2) The computer is not good enough, then you reach the other end of the spectrum where the computer is meaningless cus you have to do everything yourself. The computer cannot be trusted to handle the job.
I think this could be tackeled with a very very well run beta test and some great balanceing guys. But it would be a hard cord to strike.

3) I think the best solotion possible is to make it a coop game. A MMORTS. Look at it this way. What if you had hudreds of games of starcraft going on at once, but all the terrans were linked and all the protoss were linked, etc. And the players could jump around between the battles. Some you would win, and then you would want a player or the computer to oversee upgrading and mining then those resocures could be shunted over to another player who was activly fighting a battle. There by you have a constantly evovling world of war. You would use the computer ai on any battles not being actively watched. So then you only need to balance the computer ai vs itself, so that its allways a better idea to have a human watchdog, but not allways an option.

Just my 2 cents.

Vinsent

Woh, steady on ppl, I''m not talking about having realistic time or anything!!
I mean RTS in the non-turn-based sense, not the actually ''real''-time sense - most RTSs play havoc with any time realism and i''m into ''gameplay'' not simulation/realism.
And not loads of troops, I''m talking about accelerated time and 1 person/figure representing a large mass of troops - i.e taking Colonization/Civilization and simply adding a bit of pathfinding, default-task intelligence and having ppl slowly move between their positions instead of in a stop-start turn-based way. You could still pause the action if need be, but the main advantage would be that when moving many units across a map you can just click the end point and watch them make their own way - get away from that tedious part of turn-based games where you are just clicking each troop and clicking the destination again & again & again.

But I take the point that you may still be expected to manage numerous battle points at once - perhaps this would be the real problem area, even with clever AI following your orders it may be ultimately frustating...

I guess the alternative is what Colonization tried to do a bit - which is go for a turn-based approach but allow the setting of routes/destinations so you can just press a ''go'' key to allow a unit to continue with [automatically] it''s existing orders, rather than have to manually move the unit repeatedly.

I think the most interesting solution may be a hybrid of AI and time distortion techniques.

Give a group of plasma tanks an order like "destroy all enemies in this region" and let the AI handle things. That would easily give you the epic sense of teh game, and also take care of 90% of the logistics problems that were mentioned earlier.

Just a thought.

Apoch
Lead Developer
The Freon Project

I had a thread about this issue a little while back. The scales in RTS games are definitely out of whack, and unless game developers pay strict attention to it, it extremely affects gameplay and balance. For example, sometimes it takes just as much time to march your forces to its position as it takes for you to build a factory. In real time scale, it would take several months if not a year or more to develop a real factory, but in anything other than pre-WWI settings, troops should be able to cross continents in that time span. As a result, there are many "scales" of time present in RTS games.

I''m all for continental and even planey spanning RTS games. What I think is ingrained in players heads about RTS games is that one unit in the game represents well, one unit. Most wargames however represent the scale to be much different, so that one infantry unit, may actually represent an entire platoon or company of troops, and one tank might be a tank platoon. When you start thinking like this, the scale of battle gets much larger...and more interesting in my opinion.

Apoch-
Just a couple of threads you might want to check since I noticed you are a newly registerd member These posts more or less go into some detail about controlling units and or AI in strategy games

Leadership vs. Micro management
Unit Control (orders), Leadership, and integration
.....Of Lieutenants and Learning Agents (RTS)
Auxiliary Strategic Information
RTS unit/lance/platoon ideas?

Dauntless: an icon is an icon is an icon(or you could use 3d model), anyway, that''s another problem, if a tank represents a platoon, well, the scale still hasn''t changed, relative to what you see, so you still have a small number of units to work with, I know it certainly doesn''t happen in table top wargames, but the part I like about RTS is the fact I get to see the units fighting and shooting, which is fun and what I want to see much more of(so keep building better computers), if they get abstracted and are in real time-it will still be a small number of units fighting regardless of what you call them, platoons, companies, brigades, regiments, etc...

I think intelligent agent systems? are cool, it''s what was used to render all the ants in the background in Antz and all the orcs and elves fighting in Lord of the Rings, basically each npc is given a simple ai so they won''t run into the other ones and everything looks like it should-the animation and ai are tied together

Anonymous-
I still think that people think of icons as individual units, and this in turn creates a different mode of thinking. The scale of the icon itself might not change...as you said, an icon is an icon, but that''s only if all icons represent the same size scale

In wargames sometimes you have an counter that represents a platoon, and another counter that represents an entire company. From this one counter, you can break up a larger entity into several smaller ones. This is one trick that can be used to eliminate some clicking around if you want a large group to do the same thing.

As for the looks, I agree...half the fun is watching your little guys beating up on the other guys little icons Robert E. Lee''s famous quote, "It is a good thing war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it" almost seems like a foresight into the advent of strategy games. What''s fun is watching the fighting take place. However, at least in my game, the scale will be pretty large. I imagine a company will be the smallest controllable unit...so I''m not quite sure how to actually represent the icons themselves. If you''ve played the Close Combat series or Kohan, I think I will do it like that...where one "unit" was composed of several different animated sprites, but you couldn''t individuall control each sprite.